In the Middle East, a serving of boiled Rice"U.S. Hypocrisy Hangs Over Rice's Middle East Trip." With headlines like that in Lebanon's Daily Star, it appears that no matter how many millions of U.S.-taxpayer dollars the Bush administration throws at its public-relations effort to alter Arab attitudes about the United States, it's Washington's decades-old, inconsistent policies that will have to change before "they" ever stop "hating us." This theme has come inescapably to the surface now that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has touched down in the Middle East. Among her goals: to convince regional leaders to get on board with Team Bush's approach to the new government of the Israeli-occupied, Palestinian territories. (AlJazeera.net)
snip
Yesterday, Rice turned up in Cairo. There, at a press conference with Egypt's foreign minister, she urged the Palestinian militant group Hamas to recognize Israel's sovereignty and renounce the use of violence.
snip
Speaking of Hamas, Rice declaimed: "You cannot have one foot in the camp of terror and another foot in the camp of politics." (Xinhua)
snip
More pointedly, in Egypt's Al-Messa, commentator Tareq Aglan noted: "Condi has come here to ask for support in the war to starve the Palestinians and cut off their aid because they dared choose Hamas. She erroneously believes that Egyptians will agree to international sanctions against their brothers." (Cited by Al-Gomhuria/Egyptian Gazette)
snip
On the occasion of Rice's arrival in the region, an editorial in Lebanon's Daily Star asked: "How can the U.S. promote human rights and at the same time allow the torture of Arab prisoners, many of whom have been held in Abu Ghraib
and Guantánamo Bay for years without charge or trial? How can Washington support democracy while encouraging Arab states to sanction the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people? Contradictory policies such as these only play into the hands of extremists."
snip
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=15archive/&entry_id=3117